Wanweird- jack n crutchie <33
Wanweird - An unhappy fate.
blind!jack au just because also i’m so sorry. tw for character death
The air is cold, colder than it has been in a while, and that’s the first thing Jack notices as he steps out of the cafe and into the street, wrapping his thin coat more tightly around him and brushing his hand against the brick of the building, the painted metal of the tiny bannister. It smells, all of a sudden, like winter, and even though Jack has always hated the winter, with its complications and biting chills, he feels a twinge of excitement. Crutchie loves the winter, loves the snow and the scarves and the feel of it; Jack knows he’ll be ecstatic at the seemingly abrupt change in weather, hopes he hasn’t missed the moment that Crutchie realizes it’s here.
Jack feels Spot leave the cafe behind him, brushing up against him with his own thin coat, worn and patched. Spot makes some unintelligible noise in his throat that Jack understands means it’s time to start walking; must be later than he thinks, Jack’s never had an easy time keeping track of hours, some of them seem to go so much faster than others. They walk, Spot matching Jack’s slightly more cautious pace, feeling the way with his cane, Spot letting him lead the familiar path homeward.
Jack puts a hand in his pocket, cold, and feels the fabric of a glove that doesn’t belong to him, abandoned for the more enticing feel of skin against skin, forgetting cold, Crutchie’s glove, small and knit and left in his pocket. Jack holds it, pretending that it’s Crutchie’s hand, wondering why he had to decide to go out on this day, when the weather is turning, when it smells of snow and promise.
Three blocks, and it starts, snow light and airy and crisp and wet, falling in tiny pockets of precipitation, landing on their faces and hair and coating the sidewalk with slick pattern of flakes. Jack doesn’t realize until Spot swears, until he feels the cold snowflakes drop on his face, irregular droplets, unlike rain, until he smells the water in the air, surrounded by frozen water, something Crutchie tells him is beautiful, an airy blanket settling over the street.
They reach the cross point, where Spot goes one way, and Jack goes another way home; the traffic is abating, becoming quieter, reacting to the weather. Spot offers to walk him, ever a gentleman, but Jack doesn’t want the company, not now, wants to walk alone in the snow quickly, wants to get home and grab Crutchie and swing him around in the quiet night streets, and hear him laugh as the snow falls on his face, and hold their icy hands together in his pocket. Spot claps him on the back, Jack listens to his footfalls disappearing into the muffled distance, turns to walk on his own, path remembered, known.
**
Crutchie wakes up abruptly, asleep on the couch, curled into a corner against one of the armrests, a fraying but otherwise adequate blanket covering him almost entirely. It had suddenly gotten colder, the wind sweeping away the unseasonal warmth that had haunted them the past few months, penetrating the cracks in the apartment, too early to turn on the heat.
It takes him a moment to remember why he is alone, in a dark apartment, where everyone else is. Crutchie stretches, letting cold air fly under the blanket, shivers. A moment and he realizes a sound woke him up, what was it? He reaches out and flips on a dim lamp, the light bulb will need to be replaced soon, and climbs reluctantly off of the couch, dropping the blanket.
The windows in the apartment are almost all bare, covered by the thinnest curtains they could find, white with cut-outs like doilies at the edges, Jack’s choice; he likes to play the lace between his fingers, likes the brightness he can feel when the sun streams through the curtains. Crutchie walks over to the windows, playing the lace between his own fingers, wishing that Jack had come home already, that he would take Crutchie’s hand off of the curtains and wrap them in his own, strong ones, that he would kiss the top of Crutchie’s head and mumble nothings into his hair and pull him down onto the bed and they would wind themselves together until the cold went away, like a sun of their own making.
Crutchie sees the snow start, sees the sky open its grey hands and throw down white droplets of icy precipitation, watches the street and the trees and the buildings start to collect it like ornaments, beautiful and pure. He wishes again that Jack were there with him, even though Jack hates snow, because Jack only knows the cold and the wet and the slipping and not the beauty and the whiteness that covers everything. Still, Jack would stand at the window; Jack would wrap an arm around him as Crutchie watched the snow, and Crutchie would describe it, every snowflake, every moment, every perfect picture that set itself up for Jack not knowing that Jack couldn’t see it; Crutchie thought the world turned with more enthusiasm because it was trying to show Jack it’s beauty, and it was his job to help, to describe, to draw shapes on Jack’s hands and cheeks with his fingers and kiss Jack in all the places where snowflakes fell when they were outside.
A knock, loud and insistent, what must have woken him up in the first place. Crutchie tears himself away from the window and daydreams and walks to the door as quickly as he can. He pulls it open.
**
The streets are getting slippery, and Jack walks slowly, carefully, his cane scanning the pavement ahead of him. He thinks about the snow, and about Crutchie, about the first time they went somewhere completely alone; it was cold, colder than this maybe, and Crutchie was excited, too excited, too nervous; they walked, what they always did, and they sat on fire escapes. Jack can remember how it felt when Crutchie took his hand instead of his elbow, when it was linked fingers instead of linked arms and how warm Crutchie’s hand was despite the cold.
Jack stops at a corner and waits, listening to the faint and inconstant traffic slipping down the street, anxious to cross, close enough to home to feel it, to imagine the relative warmth of the apartment. He can hear the traffic stop, knows it’s his turn, steps out.
Jack thinks of the way Crutchie took his hand, so casually, both of them young enough to not know exactly what to do; even though Jack wasn’t without experiences, they had been fumbled and dark, not out in the open, not clutched hands in the cold evening air, wrapped like fate. And then the snow starting, the light snow, snow that Jack had always hated because it made it harder to walk, because it made things difficult for both of them. Crutchie stopped them in the middle of the street and said, it’s snowing it’s so beautiful, and Jack laughed and standing there, hands held, heard himself ask describe it to me.
The street is slick and wet and the snow is falling harder now, more wet flakes falling on Jack’s face. The noise is loud, and from his left, the intersection, the streets meeting, a loud crash and a screech, noises that Jack knows are bad, noises you don’t want to hear. Jack stops in the middle of the street, listening, waiting for his next cue.
Crutchie held his hands tightly, both of their hands turning icy and wet. He breathed out slowly and Jack hadn’t realized they were so close, or hadn’t realized it would make him feel so uncertain, suddenly, so anxious and excited and short of breath. Crutchie spoke as though he wasn’t sure, words of snowflakes and patterns and white and blankets. Jack had stopped listening, because Crutchie was inching closer, his breath warm in the icy darkness. Crutchie fumbled his words and squeezed Jack’s hand and said it’s beautiful. like this. Jack wasn’t expecting it, somehow, wasn’t prepared for the way that Crutchie leaned forward and pressed his lips against Jack’s, wasn’t prepared for the rush that filled him and made him wrap his arms around Crutchie and pull him in and hold him close like their whole lives had been building up to this moment, to this soft kiss and the intensity of Jack’s response, Jack’s need to feel all of Crutchie suddenly and always. Snow falling on their faces as they fell into each other.
Jack hears it before he feels it, hears the skid and the crack and the thump and even though he tries to move, to get out of the street, it’s only a split second, it’s only a breath and a moment, the whole world pausing as the impact occurs. The next thing he knows he’s on the ground, and everything is spinning, isn’t it, and it’s hard and cold and wet and warm and fading, and Jack imagines that he can see it, the snow, falling cold on his face, beautiful the way Crutchie always said, beautiful and bright and pure and clean and silent, it shouldn’t be silent, should it, under a cover of snow Jack breaths out and thinks of Crutchie kissing him for the first time in the snow, wrapping their lives together. Jack’s world opens and he is falling like a snowflake, pure and bright and silent.
**
Crutchie knows it’s bad the moment he opens the door and sees Davey and Katherine’s faces, the moment he reads the tear tracks down Katherine’s cheeks and the fear in Davey’s eyes and the fact that they are knocking on the door, why would they need to knock?, and he knows, he just knows, without being told, that it’s Jack, that something is wrong with Jack, that something has happened that he couldn’t prevent and couldn’t foresee and wasn’t there for.
Katherine opens her mouth to speak and Crutchie collapses onto the floor and for a moment all he can think about is the first time he and Jack ever kissed, how it was snowing, and his stomach filled with butterflies while he closed his eyes and pushed himself into Jack and how they stayed that way ever since, entwined, fate. Katherine and Davey kneel down to him, put their arms around him but it isn’t the same, maybe it never will be the same, even though he doesn’t even know what happened yet, he knows; he buries himself in them, the door to the apartment left ajar, air streaming in from outside. Crutchie buries himself in them and feels his eyes growing hot and shivers in the air from outside, and the air is cold, colder than it’s been in a while, colder than it’s ever been before.
